Value Added

Since long before ‘character education’ became trendy,
one man has taught his students right from wrong.

In Ramona, California, an unincorporated rural valley town located
36 miles, 1,400 feet in elevation, and approximately seven cultural
light years from downtown San Diego, it doesn’t take long to
realize that Olive Peirce Middle School is not a typical Southern
California institution of learning. For one thing, unlike just about
any other public school south of the Hollywood sign, there’s no
bristling perimeter fence to keep the kids caged and the intruders at
bay—you just walk right in.

Everywhere you look, there are slogans of the type seen in abundance
at rah-rah continuing education seminars: "Learning is our Number 1
priority"; "Be someone others can depend on"; "Victories are in the
classroom." But here’s the twist—at this school, the 7th
and 8th graders can actually recite these and other bits of Olive
Peirce propaganda word for word and in fact volunteer to do so. Like
giggling junior Communists at a May Day parade, three blushing student
office volunteers tell a visitor in unison, "We believe in a safe and
caring environment where we demonstrate pride in our campus, and we
treat each other with dignity, honesty, kindness, and respect." This is
the first of the school’s Five Values, memorized and internalized
by every last child, teacher, and custodian. It’s the
career-crowning fruit of a seed planted more than 20 years ago by high
school dropout-turned-values teacher Gene Doxey, who retires this June
after shaping generations of students, teachers, and even
administrators.

Gene Doxey talks with
one of his Contemporary Issues students at Olive Peirce Middle
School in Southern California.
—Photograph by Steve Goldstein

Every one of the Ramona Unified School District’s 7,200
students is eventually funneled through Doxey’s Contemporary
Issues class, a required rite of passage between elementary school and
the hormone minefield of the later grades. It was developed by Doxey in
the late 1970s, after California’s booming marijuana culture
scared the state into requiring mandatory drug-prevention programs at
schools. Doxey, then a math and English teacher at Olive Peirce,
volunteered for the job, ultimately expanding the course into a mix of
developmental science, be-careful-out-there pep talks, and extended
self-help metaphors—pretty groovy stuff for a back-country
ranching community that has survived nasty methamphetamine problems and
occasional wildfires. Within a couple of years of its inception, the
budget- busting effects of California’s property-tax-capping
Proposition 13 placed the elective in jeopardy. Rather than jettisoning
the class, however, a supportive school board decided to protect it by
making Contemporary Issues mandatory for all 7th graders.

Long before "values" and "self-esteem" became curricular buzzwords,
then clichés, in larger cities and school districts, this
youthful, silver-haired 59-year-old ex-surfer who wears his heart on
his sleeve found a solution to a perennial pedagogical dilemma: how to
teach morals in a testing- mad, secular environment. "See, I’m
completely different than what No Child Left Behind is talking about,"
Doxey says in his sandy-throated, thick-tongued voice. Standing just
over6 feet tall, with blazing, slightly haunted blue eyes, he looks
like a middleweight who retired early to give the chalkboard life a
try. "But I feel that with what I’m doing, you can really get to
these kids. Give them reasons to try, reasons to believe in themselves,
reasons to motivate themselves."

Beverly Hardcastle Stanford, director of the Center for Research on
Ethics and Values at Azusa Pacific University, and a longtime advocate
for values education, says that as the profile of values-based
education has risen in recent years, it has sparked controversy for
blurring the lines between public education and private morality.
Generally, though, "enough people buy into the idea that...there are
some universal virtues that all religions and nonreligious people can
address," Stanford says.

Meanwhile, away from the glare of big-city education politics, Doxey
has been able to blend fuzzy self-esteem building and clinical sex ed
material with bracingly frank personal testimony and religiously
grounded values lessons. The combination can sound jarring at times to
an outsider, but judging by the profusion of hugs and special
handshakes that he routinely receives after each class, the kids dig
it.

"In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion," Doxey tells his
class one March morning, launching into one of his characteristically
slightly rambling mini- sermons. "From that time to now, more than 30
million abortions have occurred. The day you were born—the day
you were born!—there were 2,740 abortions. Thank God it
wasn’t you. You survived." The most precarious time for a
child’s life, he tells them, is between the ages of 0 and 2. "I
know—I had one die. Eighteen months old. She was born with
congenital heart disease. She was beautiful."

Doxey’s
credibility comes in large part from displaying his old
wounds.

The class goes deathly quiet. Students lean in to hear their
teacher, whose grief still looks fresh. "Here you are, 12 years old,"
he says, pointing to a chalk time line that portrays the 0-2 age
bracket as a danger zone, the 2-12 range as still perilous, and 12-77
as comparatively worry-free. "If you don’t make it to here," he
says, pointing to 77, "you will do something to kill yourself. You will
decide to smoke, get involved with drugs and alcohol, be sexually
active, take high risks.... So wake up! You have so much to offer, man.
I had an18-month-old. She never made it to 7th grade." Moments later,
with the class still hushed, Doxey walks around, shakes every
student’s hand and looks each one in the eye, saying,
"You’re unique, you know that?"

Doxey’s credibility comes in large part from displaying his
old wounds, from the early deaths of his parents and daughter to the
harrowing experiences of his childhood friends. Students are reminded
subtly, albeit daily, that he graduated from the school of hard knocks.
"Gene has the opportunity to connect with kids based on his own
experiences, which were not positive," says Olive Peirce principal
Linda Solis. It’s one thing to receive lectures about clean
living from an unimpeachable adult, but quite another to hear warnings
from a self-described rebellious and spontaneous former beach boy who
got kicked out of high school for bad behavior before eventually
rebounding and becoming a teacher.

"Public education and myself just didn’t get along," Doxey
says with a chuckle. After bouncing around at a variety of odd jobs, he
finally heard an encouraging word from a professor at the University of
California, San Diego, who told the computer-room operator that he was
too bright not to have a degree. "That kind of stuck in my mind," he
recalls.

The halls at Olive
Peirce Middle are festooned with slogans that reflect Doxey's
teachings.
—Photograph by Steve Goldstein

Seventh grader Harryson Franz, who like most of Doxey’s
students combines the shaky physical awkwardness of adolescence with a
surprisingly assertive vocabulary and a willingness to talk about raw
emotions, describes how one assigned reading on "reframing a situation"
caused him to turn the other cheek when two kids ran up from behind him
and hit him. "At first I was shouting, like, ‘What are you
doing?’" Franz says. "But then I felt like, Well, maybe
they’re, like, late to a class or angry about something."
Schoolmate Nicole Meader, a small brunette with big eyes and a soft
voice, chimes in: "I think the class is helpful because of the stuff
that goes on in people’s lives and what has been going on in my
life. It just helps to understand why stuff happens and how to deal
with it." Meader’s father recently died.

The roll of students Doxey has influenced stretches back a
generation—several in his current class have parents and other
relatives who took Contemporary Issues, and at least a dozen Ramona
School District employees, including one Olive Peirce assistant
principal, are also alumni. In January, Doxey was nominated for
inclusion in Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers for
the third time, a feat all the more remarkable considering that
recommendations have to come from high-achieving students in either
high school or college, not middle school. Doxey also receives the
occasional letter from far-flung alumni whose abilities he helped
unlock, such as a cerebral palsy sufferer who recently sent notice that
he was receiving his doctorate in medicine. But in the run-up to his
retirement, Doxey wanted to see what effect he had had on his other
students’ lives, so he sent out questionnaires to his students
from four or five years ago. Their reflections, often written in the
margins, are astonishing. In response after response, the word "friend"
shows up again and again. Many former students portrayed Contemporary
Issues as an island of empathy in the terrifying sea of middle school.
"Thanks to your class, I was able to come out of my shell and face my
problems and help other people with theirs," wrote one. "You truly are
an exceptional teacher because you make differences in people’s
lives, and you are there even five or maybe 20 years later."

Doxey, who is taking early retirement in June, grows noticeably
wistful when recounting such testimonials. "Now I’m looking back
at everything and going, ‘Wow, what a great ride,’" he
says, shaking his head in wonder. "And more than that, I want to look
at what impact have I had. I don’t want to be just a teacher....I
want be the one who has impact on a kid’s life."

When Doxey walks across the small campus, it’s not just the
kids who throng to him. "How do I get to be as cool as you?" a
playground supervisor yells across the quad as Doxey strides into the
administration building. His approach—removing barriers between
teachers and students and encouraging open dialogue on private emotions
and nonacademic behavior—has rubbed off noticeably on the rest of
the faculty. And his stature—he says if Ramona ever incorporated
as a city, he could run for mayor and win—helped Solis implement
a top-to-bottom cultural overhaul of the campus, blending Doxey’s
empathetic openness with the latest recommendations from books such as
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Robert
Marzano, Jane Pollock, and Debra Pickering’s Classroom
Instruction That Works.

"Gene has always been a tremendous supporter of me, and as an icon
in this community, that was crucial," says Solis, an effusive Texan
with dyed red hair and a penchant for frilly purple jackets. The
campus—which everyone actually does refer to as "our learning
community"—is a festival of hugs and good cheer, where kids go to
"Choices" instead of detention (a philosophical change Doxey helped
push) , playground supervisors make video presentations for
statewide education conferences, and the principal appears on
television every morning to respond to student complaints and
concerns.

But will it all hang together after Doxey’s departure? Will
Contemporary Issues live on after the man who started it all leaves?
Solis says yes to both, but her own faculty and staff are not so sure.
"It’s not the program, it’s the man—trust me,"
whispers one Doxey admirer in the teacher’s lounge. For his part,
Doxey hopes to return on a part-time basis. "I need to," he says.
"There are kids in here in 7th grade, and they’re damaged so
much," he adds, almost wincing.

For now, as he prepares for retired life and rests his heart (after
suffering a heart attack at 52, he had an arterial blockage removed
last October), Doxey is contemplating converting his ideas into a
consulting practice. At any rate, he plans to continue being deeply
involved in the community, whether it be through Olive Peirce, his
church, or the local 4-H. "There’s a lot of good kids out there!"
he says, still wondrous after all these years. "I want to reinforce
what a lot of strong families believe. And it’s hard—here I
am in a public school system, like David and Goliath, man. I
don’t have a chance." Then he grins, not needing to point out
that David won.

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